In university I studied Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines. A major theme of the book is how Australia’s aborigines map their land and record their history through songlines … songs that lead you from spring to well, mountain to valley, and songs that tell you what has occured at each step of the path.
A recent post on a book called Storycatcher reminded me.
Story is the song line of a person’s life.
We need to sing it and we need someone to hear the singing.
Story told, story heard, story written, story read
create the web of life in words.
To me, blogs – at least personal blogs – are storycatchers. They’re songlines.
My personal blog is a record of where I’ve been, what I’ve done, what I’ve experienced, and my thoughts along the way. It’s my storycatcher.
And it’s my songline for when I want to retrace my path. What did I do there? What was the name of that movie? Where did we go together? It’s all only a search away.
I developed that thought last year: Blogs as personal mobile databases. Robert Scoble said something similar a week or two ago when he was interviewed by Jennifer Jones: he uses Google to search his own blog and, basically, augment his memory of events.
Where’s your songline?
[tags] songlines, blogs, blogging, database, personal, scoble, podtech, bruce chatwin, john koetsier [/tags]
John, really great thought here! It makes me think of a posting on Anectote about how pictorial stories are told. In his example, the church’s stained glass window serves the same purpose as your (or my) blog…
[…] Koestier at Bizhack wrote a post a few days ago that also intrigued me. His idea that blogs (at least personal blogs) can serve as a […]
[…] Koestier at Bizhack wrote a post a few days ago that also intrigued me. His idea that blogs (at least personal blogs) can serve as a […]